


This Time

by ElDiablito_SF



Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: Character Death, Character Death Fix, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-29
Updated: 2013-11-29
Packaged: 2018-01-02 23:05:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1062715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElDiablito_SF/pseuds/ElDiablito_SF
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Miles' death, Bass flees Willoughby only to be reunited with someone he did not expect to ever see again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [zoi_no_miko](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zoi_no_miko/gifts).



> Yeah, so, Miles is dead in this fic. I'm sure he's not really dead on the show, but I'm going with the last thing we saw in episode 2x09. 
> 
> Allusions to Miloe and Chain of Command are also here.

It had been dark, but then again, it hadn’t been anything but dark in longer than Bass could remember. Even if the full moon had been out, it somehow managed to be shrouded in clouds, or fog, or overshadowed by trees. Bats, he thought, had a distinct advantage these days. He wished he truly was a bat, because then he would be able to navigate via sonic perception alone. But a bat he wasn’t; nor was he Batman, as hilarious as he thought he’d been the last time he saw Miles Matheson alive.

And then Miles was dead. Which… was _rude_ , actually. To leave him like that. Not that their last parting was any better than the other time they parted when Bass thought it would be their last parting. One of them, it seemed, was constantly dying. Annoying, really.

Once, a lifetime ago, he had said to Miles, “If you’re dying, I’m dying with you.”

Now, however…

The asshole had taken his secret to the grave with him, and now Bass would never find his son. So, he supposed, Miles had won in the end, if his goal had been to leave Bass completely alone in the world. Bass had taken Miles’ brother from him (no, he never _meant_ to do it, but that seemed to matter little to Miles), so as revenge, Miles had taken everything from Bass. Including himself.

That was something Bass had been grateful for, actually. That he could hate him a little. It made the lack of him more bearable. He would have preferred to feel indifferent, but try as he did, he couldn’t deny that he had loved Miles, and it was much easier to jump from love to hate than to indifference.

So, he had let Rachel and Charlie weep over that corpse for all three of them, because he wouldn’t shed a tear. Perhaps, if he had been a better man, he would have stayed. But he was Sebastian Monroe, and the better man he used to be had been drowned and beaten and poisoned and buried (quite literally), so there was nothing left to do but flee.

And now, it was dark again, but with his bat-hearing he knew, he knew that voice, he wasn’t hallucinating it, it really was, the impossible thing, the improbable wish…

“Jeremy? Is that really you?”

“Surprised?”

“Wha… _how_?”

“How did I find you? Or how am I not dead?”

“B-b-both?” he stammered, eyes piercing through the darkness to study the familiar outlines of the other man’s silhouette, taking in the broad shoulders, the familiar lopsided stance. It must have been a ghost. Or an alcohol-induced hallucination. Maybe he would see Miles next. 

“I can ask you the same thing. I heard you were executed in Willoughby.”

“I was,” Bass rubbed his eyes again. “Well, Rachel apparently helped fake my death.”

“Oh,” his ghostly interlocutor shifted his stance. “Maddison helped me fake mine,” he added, taking a step closer. “I mourned you, you know.” 

_Thank God for Maddison_ , Bass thought. The young sergeant was never really a favorite of his, so who could have predicted such useful cleverness.

“I mourned you too,” Bass admitted, licking his parched lips. “You have no idea, Jeremy. I have never regretted anything as quickly as I regretted… you know.”

“My execution?”

“I wasn’t really myself,” Bass said, weakly. A meaningless statement, he knew. Of course he wasn’t really himself. He had no idea whom he had become, or when he had stopped being the man that he had always thought himself to be. “I’m not even really sure I’m myself now. But at least, I hope I’m thinking for myself again.”

“Miles?”

“Dead.”

“Oh.”

The conversation was becoming somewhat circuitous. Bass hadn’t had a cigarette in a very long time, but he suddenly wanted one very much.

“I’m sorry, Bass. I know how much you… um… cherished your friendship.”

“Can it, Jeremy.” He had almost laughed. No one had known Bass and Miles better than Jeremy Baker. Apparently not even Bass and Miles themselves. He hadn’t been their third wheel, but rather a third point of an isosceles triangle. He had been an equal.

“No, but I really _am_ sorry,” Jeremy repeated and stepped closer, his arms dangling at his sides loosely. Bass remembered what it felt like to have those lanky appendages wrapped around him and he wanted to feel that again, now more than ever. “How did it happen?”

“Someone bashed his hand in with a hammer. It got infected and… well. Leave it to Miles to die of something _stupid_ like sepsis.” Bass felt gall rise up in his craw. He was angry at Miles. Angry at him for just bending over to Death like a bitch and taking it in the ass. Angry for leaving him. Angry for taking his chance of ever knowing his son to the grave with him, like the _asshole_ he had always been. “You were right about everything, Jeremy. That I would always end up alone.”

“Bass, you’re not alone. I’m here.”

Bass blinked at him in the darkness. Jeremy’s arm moved and Bass felt the warmth of his hand resting soothingly against his tricep. Jeremy had always been really warm to the touch. An exotherm, is what he’d always proclaimed himself to be, and he was right, whatever that meant (Bass presumed it meant that you got to sleep next to an actual furnace every night - and that was nothing to sneeze at, post-apocalyptically speaking).

“But _why_?”

He had half-hoped the answer was to kill him. He would not have minded being reaped by an Angel of Death with Jeremy Baker’s face. It would be comforting.

“You know _why_ , Bass. You’ve always known why. You were just so wrapped up in your obsession with Miles that you never really stopped long enough to understand that it was real.”

“But,” Bass protested weakly because he wasn’t going to just stop and hear it that easily, “he’d always been there. I couldn’t accept a world without him, Jeremy, not while he was actually _in_ it. He had to be alive and with me, or dead and six feet under. There could never be an in-between.”

“No, I completely understand your unhealthy codependency,” Jeremy shrugged. “But what you never understood is that I loved you inspite of it.”

“You loved both of us,” Bass said with forceful certainty.

“Nope,” Jeremy shrugged again and put his other hand on Bass’ opposite arm. “It’s always been just you. Miles was… easy on the eyes, but… Mostly he’d just been the thing I had to accept if I was going to have the smallest part of you at all.”

“You were the only one who never left me,” Bass whispered, forcing himself to listen, to really _hear_ Jeremy, as if for the first time.

“Now you’re getting it.” It was as if Bass could actually hear the smile on Jeremy’s face, since he couldn’t really see it. Suddenly, he wanted to know for a fact that it was there, so he lifted his hand and let his fingers brush against the other man’s lips, like a blind man studying another’s features. He had been blind, lost for too long in the dark labyrinth that had been Miles Matheson’s heart. Jeremy was smiling against his fingers and Bass felt his heart trepidating like a hatchling bird, blindly scrambling, testing its wings in the cocoon of its nest.

“I don’t deserve to be loved like that,” Bass whispered and felt the brush of Jeremy’s tongue against the callused pads of his fingers.

“I don’t care,” Jeremy kissed into the palm of his hand.

“Jeremy,” he tried to protest, but he was being pulled closer, held tighter, the exothermic warmth radiating from Jeremy’s body like a wool blanket, coming to wrap all around him in the night.

“Bass,” Jeremy said, the smirk ever-present in his tone. “I’m going to kiss you now,” he announced.

“Please,” Bass replied, leaning in, making that last effort to close the distance between them, because Jeremy deserved that, deserved for him to make an effort, deserved so much more than the scraps Bass had given him in the past. 

And Bass could love him, _would_ love him, the way he deserved, he would be better, do anything it took, because Jeremy knew him, the _real_ him. And loved him anyways. And kissed him like he had been underwater for years and Bass was the first breath of air. Kissed him like their mouths were waves in the ocean, absorbing each other, amplifying each other, crashing against one another. Kissed him like nothing, not even death, would ever get in their way.

“You never told me how you found me,” Bass muttered, head spinning, coming up for air.

“Oh. Well, I knew you had a safe house here in Lebanon. I helped you build it last time we were in Illinois, remember?”

Bass did remember, although it seemed like several lifetimes ago. 

“So after Maddison helped sneak me out of Philly, I headed here. I don’t know, I guess I just hoped that… Really, I never thought I’d see you again.” Jeremy leaned in and pressed his lips against Bass’ temple. “I didn’t really find you, Bass. You found me.”

“Two dead men, meeting in a safe house they built more than a decade ago,” Bass chuckled. You had to admit there was something poetic to it, something akin to kismet.

“Sometimes, good things happen.” Bass could feel Jeremy smiling again, this time against the skin of his neck. He wrapped his arms around the taller man and allowed his body to sink against his buttressing strength.

“Yeah,” was all he had the strength to say, fearing that if he tried to say much of anything else, Jeremy might end up rocking him in his arms for the rest of the night while he cried (which, he was still ashamed to admit, wouldn’t have been the first time). But that wasn’t how he wanted to be rocked just at that moment.

“Are you going to let me?” Jeremy asked, and Bass knew that he meant more than just the seeking of his hands along the loose lines of his sagging clothes. 

But he was going to let him. He was going to let him _everything_.

“Yeah,” Bass said again. And he was going to love him back, this time. This time, he was going to get it right.


End file.
